In a move that marketing professor Scott Galloway is calling a “seminal moment” in the AI wars, Anthropic used a Super Bowl commercial to take a direct shot at market leader OpenAI, successfully getting under the skin of CEO Sam Altman. The advertisement, which claims, “Ads are coming to AI, but not to Claude,” capitalizes on recent news that OpenAI is testing advertisements on ChatGPT. According to Galloway, the ad’s effectiveness lies not just in its humor, but in its recognition of the dominant, unspoken use case for artificial intelligence: therapy.
During a recent segment of the Prof G Markets podcast with cohost Ed Elson, Galloway said that what Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei understands—and what makes this ad so vicious and so effective—is that while corporations discuss AI as a productivity enhancer, the reality of user behavior is far more intimate.
The top use case for AI is, in fact, “therapy,” according to Galloway, and “people are revealing their most intimate questions and concerns to AI.” (That is the setup for the Anthropic commercial.)
Jess Ramos, founder of Big Data Energy Analytics, declared on LinkedIn that it was the most thought-provoking Super Bowl ad of the year and that it “obliterated ChatGPT” by poking fun at how many people use it for therapy and validation. Then it “ended with a smackdown of what they think ads will look like in ChatGPT: abruptly interrupted conversation with insensitive ad placements.”
Introducing ads in the middle of a therapy session creates a dystopian scenario that Anthropic is smart to exploit, Galloway said. If a user confesses to an AI that they are suffering from depression, the trust is broken if the platform immediately pivots to monetization.
“The thought that this person is going to take all your personal information and start saying, ‘Oh, you seem to be suffering from depression. Have you thought about Lexapro?’” is a major vulnerability for OpenAI, he added.
Other analysts have praised the ad’s impact, with Australian marketing journalist Mark Ritson dubbing the campaign as “the first piece of effective brand strategy the AI category has produced.”
Echoes of Apple’s legendary ‘1984’ Super Bowl ad
By drawing a hard line in the sand—promising no ads—Anthropic has executed a classic brand strategy, Galloway said.
Because OpenAI has already signaled a move toward ad-supported models to meet growth projections, he explained, it cannot easily refute Anthropic’s privacy-focused stance.
The effectiveness of the attack was made evident by the response from OpenAI’s Altman. Following the ad’s release, he posted a long critique on social media, calling the commercial “dishonest” and “deceptive.”
“Our most important principle for ads says that we won’t do exactly this; we would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them,” Altman wrote. “We are not stupid, and we know our users would reject that.”
Galloway characterized Altman’s reaction as a significant misstep, saying, “When you’re the market leader … you don’t reference the competition.” He pointed out that Hertz never referenced Avis, and Coke never referenced Pepsi. By writing an essay-length rebuttal rather than simply dismissing the ad with a compliment, Altman inadvertently validated Anthropic as a serious threat. “He just comes across as defensive,” Galloway observed.
He compared the commercial to Apple’s legendary “1984” Super Bowl ad, which positioned the Mac against the “Big Brother” of IBM. (Considered perhaps the best Super Bowl commercial of all time, the riff on the classic George Orwell novel was named “Commercial of the Decade” by Advertising Age at the end of the 1980s, and was inducted into the Clio Awards Hall of Fame in 1995.) Just as Apple framed IBM as an authoritarian controller of information, Anthropic was positioning OpenAI as a data-harvesting entity that will “prostitute [its users] to advertisers.”
This marketing coup may signal a shift in market dominance. Galloway predicted that within 12 months, Anthropic will be worth more than OpenAI. He drew a parallel to the PC wars of the 1990s, when Gateway (consumer-focused) eventually lost ground to Dell (enterprise-focused). While OpenAI has captured the consumer imagination, Anthropic is aggressively targeting the enterprise market where data security and privacy are paramount.
Ultimately, the ad highlighted a critical juncture for the industry. Users want to know that the AI they confide in is a “clean, well-lit place,” free from pharmaceutical influence or commercial manipulation. By tapping into the intimacy of the user-AI relationship—effectively, the therapy use case—Anthropic has drawn first blood in the battle for trust.
Regarding Altman’s frustration, Galloway’s cohost, Elson, agreed that Anthropic is emerging as the winner, “and for Sam Altman to come out and give this essay on critiquing the details … it just rubs salt into the wounds.”